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Monthly Archives: May 2010

We all but predicted Antanas Mockus would coast to victory in the Colombian election, but Colombia’s voters had another plan. Today, in the first round of voting, Colombian voters gave Uribe protegé and Chávez nemesis Juan Manuel Santos a whopping 46% of the votes in the first round. Mockus, in turn, came in second with…

A few days ago, I wrote a piece for the Venezuelan Internet magazine Prodavinci on the importance of property rights in Venezuela’s poor barrios. (Click here if you’d like to read it, it’s in Spanish) A commenter left a link to this audio-visual essay, which I found fascinating. You should check it out. Make sure…

A while back, when I was writing about the jailing of Oswaldo Álvarez Paz, a reader who spends a lot of time in Petare wrote in to tell me that nobody in the barrios was talking about this. I’m sure this was true. Little by little, jail has become established as a "normal" government response…

Yesterday marked another insane low in the festering of Hugo Chávez’s Revolution. In the process of slamming the opposition for supposedly rejoicing over the first quarter drop in GDP, Chávez, in effect, rejoiced over the first quarter drop in GDP. It’s hard to contain the sheer, blind rage this response sets off in me. In celebrating…

By now you’ve seen the hair-raising numbers: Venezuelan GDP plunged 5.8%, year on year, in the first quarter. The detail that got me, though, was this: according to the Central Bank, the oil economy contracted by 5% and the the non-oil economy contracted by 4.9%, but the overall economy contracted by more than either of…

Former taxman José Vielma Mora will now be known as something other than "the only chavista who is semi-competent": a traitor to the Revolution! Here is Vielma Mora’s hilarious, totally unbelievable attempt to stake out a position as some sort of moderate chavista, a position he conveniently expressed only after he didn’t get the cambur…